Jinn of Quality and Risk

I noted this on February 5th already. It bears repeating: Did environmentalist dogma lead to the Columbia disaster? All the evidence is pointing in this direction. The loss of Challenger was also shown to be caused by the adoption of environmentalist dogma.

Hannes Hacker, an aerospace engineer and former flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston: Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster--and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists. Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster. But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program. The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a ten-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam. But NASA--a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests--did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse their fatal decision.

See also: The difficulty of evaluating risks and learning from failures (2003-Apr-24)
Shuttle loss and death by PowerPoint (2003-Mar-27)
Faulty epistemology and the loss of the Columbia (2003-Mar-13)